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Couchbase serves Membase for OS X

Big Data pie for fanbois

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Mac-happy coders are getting served a slice of Big Data pie, courtesy of the NoSQL shop Couchbase.

The company, formed this year through the rather curious wedding of Couchio and Membase, has this week announced the latter's Membase Server on Apple's OS X, as a community edition.

Membase Server is a distributed key-value store for data management and interactive web apps, and it plays in the family of NoSQL architectures.

Users of Membase Server include Facebook-friendly Zynga, which claims more than 235 million active users of for FarmVille, Café World, and Mafia Wars.

According to Couchbase, Membase Sever for OS X provides "developer-friendly" features that will let you take "full advantage" of the Jobsian OS X operating system and make it easier for devs coding on their Macs to build scalable web apps using Membase Server.

Apps built for Membase Server for OS X can be deployed on Red Hat and Ubuntu Linux and on Microsoft's Windows.

CouchOne merged with Membase in February – some welcome consolidation in a space full of contenders ready for the title of "next big thing" but where fee-paying adoption outside the hyper-scale computing elite is hard.

CouchOne changed its name from Couchio before the acquisition and announced it was moving into mobile with CouchOne Mobile, which it called a reliable alternative to SQLite.

Until then, Couchio CouchOne specialized in supporting the CouchDB document store that lives under an Apache license and whose users paying for support and services include Canonical, Apple, the BBC, and Mozilla.

Membase also underwent a name change. In 2010, it ditched its original NorthScale moniker. The company had provided key-value and memcache products and services, and it had partnered with Cloudera on joint customers AOL Advertising and ShareThis.

In March, the merged company announced a new board of directors that would "play a significant role in shaping the company's strategy and technical direction."

The board includes PostgreSQL core team member Josh Berkus, HTTP and URI author and Apache contributor Roy Fielding, and Cloudera chief executive Mike Olson, the former CEO of Sleepycat Software, bought by Oracle in 2006. ®